The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (162 page)

Early on the morning of 22 January, Rhett Forrester was sitting at the wheel of his car at a northwest Atlanta intersection. According to a witness, he was approached by two men and an argument ensued; one of the men then produced a gun and shot the singer in the back, the bullet piercing his heart. Although Forrester was able to drive a few blocks before flagging down a police cruiser, he died as he tried to explain what had happened. More than ten years on, no motive for the killing has ever come to light, and the perpetrators are apparently still at large. Original Riot singer Guy Speranza died in 2003.

MARCH

Friday 18

Ephraim Lewis

(Wolverhampton, England, 1968)

A soul/R & B vocalist of whom much was expected, Ephraim Lewis had been recording for four years by his tragic demise in 1994. Lewis was the youngest of eight children, who were prompted by their father, Jabez, to form a Jackson Five-style vocal/gospel act. Some of the kids – Ephraim included – acted on this, but the venture fell apart with the death of their mother in 1984. The 16-year-old Lewis then left home, to be discovered by Sheffield’s Axis Studio, whose owners, Kevin Bacon and Jon Quarmby, believed that they might have hit upon the ‘British Michael Jackson’. Elektra Records agreed that this young singer had something, signed him and issued a debut album,
Skin,
in 1991 – which then didn’t perform as anticipated. Aside from sluggish album sales, Ephraim Lewis had one or two unresolved personal issues: splitting with a long-term girlfriend, he began an affair with student Paul Flowers, whom he had met by chance at (appropriately) Sheffield Botanical Gardens. They were apparently very happy, until Lewis left the country. To improve his commercial potential, Elektra had sent Lewis to work with new songwriters in Los Angeles – but pretty much as soon as he’d touched down, the singer fell in with some questionable company. Now openly gay, Lewis wanted to use his incipient fame to promote a positive image to other young black gays (of whom there are precious few in the music industry). The downside of all this, however, was Lewis’s increased use of drugs, particularly methamphetamine (speed) – the substance of choice in the West Hollywood gay community. On the day he died, Lewis, it seems, experienced a delayed reaction to the drug he had taken earlier in the week, and the young prodigy’s behaviour degenerated into what was widely described as very public psychosis. When his naked antics at his apartment were reported to the police at 7 am, Lewis apparently descended into deep paranoia, attempting to escape arrest by scaling the tenement building’s outside wall and leaping from balcony to balcony. At the top floor, he tried to break into a room by smashing a window, inflicting injuries on himself as he did so. Then the inevitable happened: Lewis missed a jump and fell, hitting the courtyard below via an ornamental ficus tree. He suffered extensive – and ultimately fatal – head injuries.

For years afterwards, his family pursued the possibility that Lewis’s label – or the police – might be responsible for their boy’s death, but to little avail. Of his seven siblings, a brother, Sylvester, also died in his twenties, while two others have had extensive treatment for psychiatric disorders.

‘The music that guy had in him. He was as good as Sam Cooke.’

Richard Hawley, formerly of Lewis’s labelmates The Longpigs

Tuesday 22

Dan Hartman

(Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 8 December 1950)

The Edgar Winter Group

Keyboard/bass wizard Dan Hartman played with his first band, The Legends, at just thirteen – but his prodigious talent didn’t see any real return for another decade. By then, Hartman was a fully paid-up member of The Edgar Winter Group, alongside other young rock luminaries like Rick Derringer and Ronnie Montrose. The band scorched to US number one with the largely improvised opus ‘Frankenstein’ in 1973. ‘Free Ride’, a follow-up hit later that year, was penned by Hartman himself. But as the decade progressed, Hartman – perhaps to the chagrin of his R & B/rock buddies – developed an interest in dance music, leaving EWG in 1976 and signing with Blue Sky. Two years later, gold-selling single ‘Instant Replay’ caused a sensation in the discotheques and penetrated the Top Ten in Britain, where the record was on permanent radio rotation and became one of that year’s top sellers. Hartman’s biggest US hit was 1984’s catchy ‘I Can Dream about You’, also a Top Twenty success in the UK, where Hartman’s ‘Relight My Fire’ became a chart-topper for Take That & Lulu just before his death.

Although he was diagnosed with AIDS in the late eighties, Dan Hartman continued working, producing records for artists of the calibre and diversity of Foghat, Tina Turner, Muddy Waters and Paul Young at his own Schoolhouse Studios. The much-respected musician died from a brain tumour in Connecticut.

Randy Jo Hobbs (
August 1993); Chuck Ruff (
October 2011). EWG guitarists Jerry Weems (d 1999) and the legendary Ronnie Montrose (d 2012) have also died.

APRIL

Tuesday 5

Kurt Cobain

(Hoquiam, Seattle, 20 February 1967)

Nirvana

Maybe some are just too pure for success. Dubbed ‘The Voice of a Generation’ when he was alive and ‘The Last Great Rock Star’ after his death, Kurt Cobain – so he claimed – never really wanted it. Behind those searching blue eyes was the mind of a victim, a reluctant star who despaired at the thought of mass acceptance. But if, as Liam Gallagher might have it, Cobain was a ‘fuck-up who couldn’t handle it’, there are countless reasons for the Nirvana frontman’s slide into grunge hell – and not all are directly related to the man’s status as the top dog in rock’s pound. By the time grunge had become a ‘brand’ Cobain was already streets ahead of the designer turmoil adopted by his rivals. Through the brilliant, intuitive medium of Nirvana’s music, he made a difference; that his position as number one was utterly deserved only goes to make Cobain’s tale more stirring.

Any two-bit psychologist will tell you that the kind of dysfunctional upbringing endured by Cobain is likely to encumber an individual’s development, no matter how outwardly happy or talented he or she may appear. As a boy growing up in the logging-town backwater of Aberdeen, Seattle, Cobain spent as many nights on the sofas of kindly neighbours and schoolmasters – or even under a local bridge – as he did at home. The busted-up relationships of his parents (either together or apart) and the resultant triangle of anger enveloping them and their young son were what coloured the future star’s lyrics. That so many of his songs mention firearms is no coincidence either: when the confrontational Cobain had ‘gotten bored of throwing shit at cars’, he fished all his father’s guns from the muddy waters of the Wishkah – where they had been thrown by his frustrated mother – and traded them for his first amp. He discovered the power of the chord, first through Led Zeppelin and then through British punk rock. Although he was disappointed by the paucity of tiffing in, for example, The Clash’s
Sandinista!,
it taught the young guitarist that powerful needn’t mean violent. Cobain started creating his anthems as a teenager: he hung with Seattle heroes and ‘godfathers of grunge’ The Melvins, inspiring his own band, Skid Row (who also went by various other names). Cobain learned both to play properly and to present himself, his music and his very original thoughts. But until they became Nirvana, nobody gave this band too much of a shout; eventually Sub Pop did, in 1989, allowing Cobain (vocals, guitar), Krist Novoselic (bass) and Chad Channing (percussion) to cut their first album,
Bleach,
for a bargain $600 (coughed up by temporary guitarist Jason Everman). The ‘bargain’ was, of course, Sub Pop’s.
Bleach
surprised altrock fans by throwing a few melodies into the postpunk stew: one of Cobain’s finest tunes, ‘About a Girl’ (allegedly written for his live-in girlfriend, Tracy Marander), had its first outing here.